Picture of the Week: Lonely Dog

What A Weird Day…

I recently par­tic­i­pated in a Blog Car­ni­val at China Story Weekly, where I sub­mit­ted a story about the rough Chi­nese mas­sages I had when I vis­ited Bei­jing last year.

It was so much fun, I fig­ured I’d host my own car­ni­val: tthe “what a weird day!” Car­ni­val!

For those who are not famil­iar with Blog Car­ni­vals, the goal is to basi­cally gather as many posts as pos­si­ble on a given theme. You send me your sto­ries through Blog Car­ni­val, and I will pub­lish them. The dead­line is June 8^th, 2009. You will get a back­link in the process if that can be an incen­tive too.

The theme for this month is “what a weird day!”. We all expe­ri­enced a day when noth­ing goes as planned, when the world just looks strange, when we wit­ness some­thing unusual. At least I hope so… wouldn’t like being the only one!

All you have to do is sub­mit your arti­cle at Blog Car­ni­val (you don’t even need to reg­is­ter). It can be an old post or a new arti­cle writ­ten just for me (I’m flat­tered, really!). We are quite a mul­ti­lin­gual crowd here, so you can write in Eng­lish, but also in Span­ish, French and Man­darin. Have fun!

Allow me to share one of my stories…

In fall 2006, I went back to France for a few weeks. I stayed at my par­ents’ place, in Nantes, where I grew up: a five storeys build­ing in the city center.

I was study­ing for my Chi­nese exams and every­day, I fol­lowed the same rit­ual, which included mem­o­riz­ing a few hun­dred char­ac­ters, fig­ur­ing out why wenyan (ancient Chi­nese) was so fucked up and why I really needed to know all the changyu.

In a word, I was study­ing late and was rarely up before twelve.

One morn­ing, I got up and sleep­ily went down­stairs to pick up the mail. I opened the mail box, retrieved a bunch of junk fly­ers and a lit­tle sheet of A4 paper, neatly folded in two. I climbed back upstairs, sort­ing out the junk mail to put it directly in the recy­cle bin at the door. The lit­tle sheet of paper would have ended up there if I hadn’t dropped it on the floor while open­ing the door.

I glanced at it: it was from the city of Nantes. A word caught my eye: evac­u­a­tion. I called my mum and showed her the paper. We both started giggling.

– Is it a joke?
– Well, I don’t think so.

Accord­ing to the paper we had received, a WW2 Amer­i­can bomb had been found in the Loire, the main river cross­ing the city. Con­struc­tion work­ers dig­ging the new med school’s foun­da­tions had dis­cov­ered the 500 pounds explo­sive, safely buried under con­crete. Ooops.

The bomb wasn’t safe (gee…) and had to be defused. We were all asked to evac­u­ate the city on the fol­low­ing Sun­day, from 4 am. Those who had nowhere to go would be taken to the nearby sta­dium by the city of Nantes.

We were Thurs­day. My par­ents didn’t have a car and we were five peo­ple anyway.

We called my grand-parents, but since they only lived 500 meters away, they had received the note as well. I called some friends, but they all lived down­town Nantes, in the unsafe perimeter.

We held a fam­ily coun­sel. My mother didn’t want to go to the sta­dium: she feared that even though the city pro­vided trans­porta­tion, it would be packed. My father didn’t feel like going either: he had bet­ter things to do at 4 am on a Sun­day, like sleep­ing. My brother and my sis­ter wanted to stay home, because it was kind of cool. And I wanted to stay home because of all the rea­sons men­tioned above. A no-brainer. We rarely do what we are sup­posed to do in my fam­ily anyway.

My par­ents live nearby the Quai de la Fosse, on the bank of the river. We weighted the pros and the cons, but fig­ured that we would be fine.

Us vs. The Bomb

For a cou­ple of days, we had a lot of fun telling peo­ple we were being evac­u­ated. I emailed Feng, who was in Ottawa, and he didn’t believe me until I send him an arti­cle.

On Sat­ur­day night, we said our prayers… no, wait a sec­ond, wrong fam­ily. We just joked and bugged each other as usual. My mother’s only con­ces­sion to the bomb threat was to take her gera­ni­ums inside.

At dawn, we started to hear the civil defense’s chop­pers above us. Soon after, the police arrived in the sup­pos­edly empty safety perime­ters do to a last check. We heard them enter­ing our build­ing. A few sec­onds later, they climbed the stairs and ham­mered on the door:

– Police, open this door!

We remained quiet and they even­tu­ally left to check oth­ers doors. Still, I wouldn’t like being a crim­i­nal woken up by the police at the door… feels weird.

The city cen­ter was strangely quiet but for the sound of the chop­pers and for the police and mil­i­tary cars’ flash­ing lights. Even­tu­ally, around noon, we heard the civil defense siren, let­ting us know the bomb had been safely defused.

We later learned that out of the 20,000 peo­ple who had to evac­u­ate, only about 500 went to the sta­dium. Sure, some prob­a­bly spent the week­end out­side the city, but appar­ently, a lot stayed home like us. French always do the oppo­site of what they are sup­posed to do!

Any­way… that was a weird day!

How about you? Tell me about your weird day and join the Blog Carnival!

Related posts:

1. The Blog Car­ni­val Sto­ries Are Here!
2. St Malo — A Walled City
3. Pic­ture of the Week: Curi­ous Ant
4. Mod­ern Montréal
5. Morn­ings